Discussion on skin licenses

[Crest]

There's a stickied thread that goes over how skins can have any license they feel like and suggests the CC BY-NC-SA (ShareAlike) license, which is the copyleft version of the Creative Commons license.

I feel it doesn't explain the drawbacks with such copyleft licensing though. Copyleft 'spreads' by forcing an author to license their entire code base as the same license as any combined code from a copyleft licensed source and anyone using any part of the code then has to license their code similarly.

This is unlike other more permissive licenses by CC which only require attribution or attribution + non-commercial use, or licenses like MIT.

An example of the drawback would be an author creates various useful functions in Lua, as part of a skin. Things that could be used outside of a Rainmeter context. Anyone thinking of utilizing a portion that interests them would then need to relicense all their code (assuming they have a compatible, more permissive open source license) to be copyleft instead which they may not want, merely because some unrelated copyleft code elsewhere is mixed in the distributed code base. So they may choose to not use it in their project at all (or try to use it but forego any attribution as a workaround). This isn't ideal imo.

I know some authors aren't even aware what they're getting into with copyleft so thought I'd just mention it. Likely some code bases are already mix and matching incompatible licenses hence why more permissive licenses are better in that regard.

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One wrinkle is that there's less firm consensus on whether CC's ShareAlike is as copyleft as GPL (which is very clear that any mixed code forces GPL on everything else), seemingly since there hasn't been as much legal precedent as GPL (and CC licenses are generally discouraged for code).

Also the original author is still free to distribute non-mixed parts of their code under whatever license they want (since they hold the inherent copyright) but here I'm referring to the typical scenario of a separate user inspecting a skin / finding the source code in a singular online repo.